


Signal Blue

by exocredit



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: ACAB, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Backstory, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, No Sex, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Reclaimed Use Of Queer, Sorry Cop (Disco Elysium)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28554318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exocredit/pseuds/exocredit
Summary: Kim hasn't been himself recently. Harry negotiates with him to understand why. Moralism was never an option.A gay communist love story.Rated M for intimacy, strong language, and state persecution. This work focuses on in-universe social & political issues and is written from a leftist perspective.
Relationships: Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35





	Signal Blue

**Author's Note:**

>   * Harry is written here as the Thinker archetype (5/1/2/4, signature skill is Encyclopedia), a sorry cop, and a communist.
>   * This fic was prompted by a tweet from a bot on Twitter that uses an algorithm against existing game text to invent new snippets of Disco Elysium written content. The first 14 words of the fic come from that tweet. [https://twitter.com/Endless_Disco/status/132506747334815744](https://twitter.com/Endless_Disco/status/1325067473348157446)
> 


"Lieutenant, please..." Kim pulls on his cigarette as he backs up against the railing. His eyes meet yours, serious and focused, conveying the unspoken end of the sentence: "...don't."

You bring your hand down from the place in the air where it had briefly touched his shoulder. He exhales smoothly, the calm in his breath not betraying the tension he still holds in the rest of his body. You break off your gaze and take a step to the side to give him space. A snippet of a sappy relationship advice book floats to the surface of your mind, something about touch being one of several love languages. Either he prefers a language other than touch or he draws a firm line against receiving it from a fellow officer.

From the moment you met him, Kim has laid out clear and precise boundaries between his personal and professional lives. You, on the other hand, emerged from the amniotic fluid of ethanol with no such walls in place and no solid ground to start building them on, either. He's pieced together enough of your history from the rest of the Major Crimes Unit to be very aware of your former professional persona centering around lethal amounts of machismo. You don't want to repeat that part of your past, which he acknowledges, but he has kept a close eye on how you've reformed yourself into a person after your bizarre rebirth. You privately hope that he's proud of what he sees.

Even if you consider yourself a bit emotionally short-sighted, you spend enough time around your partner to have picked up on the ripples of melancholy surrounding him. There is an expertly engineered dam that contains Kim's emotional reservoirs, and unfortunately your proficiency with hand tools starts and ends with chain-cutters and crowbars. You would only make the leak worse if you tried to help patch it up. If he accepts your support, your duty to him is to act as a levee that prevents the water from reaching your other fellow officers while he repairs the damage.

You slowly take a drag as you lean over the railing and your eyes wander into the vague, dimly lit distance of nighttime. The view from this little alcove at Precinct 41 is nothing to write home about, even during the daytime. "What you're going through is clearly personal and I have no intention to pry. Is there anything I can do to avoid making it worse for you?"

Turned away from you still, he replies with flattened affect, "Simply do your job. You are not responsible for my well-being."

Damn it, he doesn't have to keep himself closed off like this. "Your well-being is part of my job. I am my brother's keeper."

He pauses to think, taking a breath to steady himself. "Dolorian scripture will not work on me."

What made Kim hesitate just now? He is not a man of faith; your brief involvement in the saga of the church-turned-nightclub is evidence enough of that. It wouldn't be like him to suddenly take an interest in the Innocence herself, either. The closest thing he has to a chosen faith is his firm commitment to doing the right thing in Revachol by serving as an officer of the RCM. This is one of the few things you know for certain that anchors him both personally and professionally.

When you had pressed him on it sometime in the beginning of your partnership in Martinaise, he told you that he was a moralist. You took this at face value and filed it away, knowing the name of the ideology but none of what it meant in practice. It took on a different meaning when you met the bureaucrat from the Coalition government who happily answered your straightforward questions about Moralintern with incomprehensible euphemisms and acronyms. It darkened in color when you learned about the Coalition warship stationed above the Bay of Revachol capable of annihilating any target in the city in less than a minute. It was permanently stained with blood when you were cornered into resisting Krenel's drunk, violent agents of capital and their semiautomatic rifles with only your revolvers and your wits.

In comparison to the so-called "tribunal", it didn't seem like a violent act at the time when you chose to arrest Klaasje. She surrounded herself with intricate layers of fiction, but the despair she felt at being cuffed and taken in by Kim was genuine. Your partner insisted to her that being in RCM custody was safer than being free. You had a sinking feeling that something wasn't right. As the other loose ends of the case tied up, you eventually learned that the Moralintern's version of law and order was to end her life.

After he transferred to the 41st and the two of you got into the rhythm of casework as partners, Kim's resolve remained as firm and reliable as ever. His confidence flourished as he was afforded genuine respect by his new colleagues. You gradually established your sobriety and stability without him ever intentionally aiding you – it was enough to come into work and take heart in the way he truly loved the city as his home. Now that a year had passed and the spring of '52 was warming the air, something in his rock solid volition seemed to be hollowing out.

The abrasive and racist treatment that he received at the hands of city residents wasn't what seemed to be getting under his skin, as much as it made you feel sick. It was something else that took you months to notice despite the answer sitting in plain sight in front of you. Kim was gradually undergoing more strain each time he needed to place someone under arrest, his neutral facade starting to lose its staying power.

Of course, Klaasje was not the first person who he had sentenced to the faceless hell of the Moralintern courts, its decisions made by the gnarled, rotting hand of the market. He has been doing this for 20 years of his life. As much as it made your stomach twist, your sense of empathy could not help but be closely tuned in to the discomfort he felt as he was faced with what seemed like a crisis of conscience.

Okay, _maybe_ some of this theory is just a hunch that has taken on a life of its own. It doesn't make very much sense that making arrests would only start causing him distress this late in his career. There were so many other godawful things about being an RCM officer that could have laid waste to his morale, chief among them the inability to offer the people of the city anything other than punitive justice for transgressions against the Coalition's Criminal Code. What about treatment for addiction? Stable housing? Education?

You're probably reading too much into Kim's reaction to "my brother's keeper," too. Admittedly, it was an intentional choice of words on your part – Moralintern is an organization that is a natural extension through history of the ideology fostered during Innocentic rule, especially things like Dolores Dei's war crimes. Anyone quoting Dolorian scripture in the modern day is making reference to moralist ideology, much like quoting Kras Mazov is inextricably bound up with communism.

Enough deliberating, you basket case. You need to actually discuss these ideas with him if you ever want to conclude this thought project. If you frame it as being work-related, he may be amenable to talking about it.

"Understood. Is there work that I can take off your shoulders? I can't change the law, but maybe I can change something I'm doing."

He shakes his head, posture softening a bit. Redirecting the subject of conversation to something other than his feelings was the right move. "No, you've been taking on your fair share. You said it yourself. We can't change the law."

You pivot to face him. "If it were up to you, how would you change the law?"

He draws on his cigarette. "It hasn't ever really been about the law, has it?"

"What hasn't been?"

A wry smile plays across his face as he turns to you, elbow supporting him on the railing. "Don't tell me you've been neglecting your studies, comrade."

Oh. _Oh._ This explains at least some of why he seems to be at odds with moralism recently, but you have no idea what motivated his change in beliefs. Or maybe he's just pulling your leg? There's plausible deniability in the way he said it.

You grin in return. "Of course not, officer. Keeping Revachol West impoverished and indebted has always been legal, ethics be damned."

He nods. "It almost makes you wish that someone were in charge of ethics around here."

We're hitting peak Kim sarcasm – the only winning move is to keep playing. "I know, right? I'd kill for some kind of moral order enforcers."

The warmth leaves his face instantaneously. Shit. This was _not_ the winning move. Guilt sends a bolt of ice down your spine.

His words are slow and deliberate: "You and I _have_ killed. For some kind of moral order enforcers."

Your eyes drop to the ground as sweat breaks out around your neck. There's no salvaging this without an apology, is there, you sorry bastard? You fumble your cigarette to your lips to buy time as you try to scramble together the words to get out of the hole you dug for yourself. 

Thankfully, he interrupts your shame spiral before it gets out of hand. "Detective, I'm not chastising you. This is part of our duty as officers. It is, unfortunately, something I have been thinking about more than I would like."

You never painted him as a thought project kind of guy, but a serious enough concern like this would take any rational person time to process. You now have a better sense of the problem he's been thinking over – what kind of solution could he be coming up with?

"Is there a particular case that's been on your mind?"

He rubs at his neck absentmindedly. "I wouldn't put it that way. It's more of a response to... current events."

Confusion writes itself across your face before you have time to think about your reaction. He does not choose to elaborate, his face remaining neutral.

Does he know something that you don't? You can't read his expression and nothing you've overheard from your fellow officers rings a bell. "Do I know about these current events?"

After a pause just long enough to make you squirm, he speaks without putting any effort into hiding his amusement. "If you did, I don't think you would be asking, lieutenant." 

You suddenly feel as though your guts have been politely skewered by an épée. He's a good sportsman about it, but you have to admit you walked straight into the punishment you got. You let out a groan of defeat. There's nothing but ash and filter left of your cigarette, so you discard it into the repurposed coffee can in the corner.

Kim doesn't often get the chance to catch his intellect-driven partner asking a profoundly stupid question. He takes a few more moments to savor the schadenfreude. "How about we catch up with this over something to eat? Are you busy after our shift on Friday?"

Today's Monday. That's plenty of time to take care of your mulling, Dick Mullen. The two of you haven't gotten takeout or been to a diner in the past few weeks, it'll be nice to do something together outside of work again. "That sounds great, I've got no plans that night."

"Then it's a date." He finishes off the last of his cigarette and stubs it on the sole of his boot, gracefully tossing it into the can. Fatigue has caught up with him by this time of night, but he still flashes you a smile. "Goodnight, lieutenant."

"Goodnight, detective." He slips back into the building. You close your eyes and spend a few minutes in the stillness committing the kindness in his eyes to memory before leaving for home.


End file.
